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Firefox Facts has been around a long time. As some of you might know, this website’s roots come from back when I worked at Lockergnome. It was Chris Pirillo’s idea to create this website and the free ebook at the time and since then it has turned into one of the most popular Firefox tips websites out there today. However, now I need your help. I would like to hear your feedback about how I can improve Firefox Facts and make it better for you.

For those of you who do not know, an IAmA is pretty much a chat somebody does on Reddit where they can be asked about anything at all. Recently, the Mozilla people stepped up and answered a lot of interesting questions and comments about the company, Firefox itself and everything in between. I’d highly suggest you check it out.

I got an e-mail the other day from a Firefox Facts reader that wanted to know where the best Firefox related forum on the Web is. Well, there are a lot of places that might discuss Firefox in forum form, however there are two places I like to point people for their Firefox forum needs.

So how do you make Firefox show those foreign characters? You know – the ones that show up as “???” when your looking at a Web site from a different country? Amy sent me in this question last week.

I’ve added many languages under Firefox options. And yet when I view a site with Japanese writing, for example, it comes up as “?????”. Even when I’m absolutely sure of the language, and have added it to my language options, the characters won’t show.

The answer? I didn’t know – but Amy figured it out and shared it with me.

It was an Windows OS thing, not a FF thing.
Controls panel –> Regional and Language Settings –> Languages –> check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box.

Have any Firefox issues that are giving you troubles? Want to be able to do something, but don’t know how? Send it in to me and I’ll do my best to find any answer to your most wanted as well.

Now those of you who follow my other projects know that I do a weekly podcast on and about the Web hosting industry called the Web Hosting Show. Now I have been doing that for about three years, I think I am getting pretty good at this whole “audio recording” too.

So I am curious if anybody out there would be interested in seeing a Firefox Facts podcast? This is just an idea right now, and I would figure that I would cover a lot of what I cover here – but in audio form. I could also take your audio questions and comments or do interview with Firefox “movers and shakers”.

Now I am not going to promise anything just yet, just interested in hearing if there would be any interest from the public in me following up with the project.

I figured today I would post some of the most wanted Firefox Facts that I have gotten and have not been able to answer. This way at least, we can get the ideas out there so that if there is a solution – we can find an answer. On the other hand, if there isn’t a solution, then at least we have created a place for extension writers to gain some inspiration.

Bob – how about being able to type an email now for a specified later delivery? (via Google’s gMail)

Ken – This is a simple one, but… I’d love it if the mouse-over tab color were different than the active tab color. Right now they’re the same. And if the mouse is over the [X], then it’s lit up the same way. I keep closing what I think is the active tab I’m currently looking at when it’s merely the one my mouse happens to be over. Frustrating.

Zeke – Need an easy way to resize the font for the “bookmarks” sidebar.

Evgeny – I would really like to have an extension for quick sending e-mail from GMail.

Jens – I want to know what week it is, in my statusbar. That feature is for some reason not included in “date & time” in Windows, not even in Google calendar, and not in my mobile phone. Why?

Seymour – What I would love to find is an extension that would display Bookmark folders in several columns next to each-other even filling up the whole screen; then I could more easily mouse over to the appropriate folder which then would expand when I moused over to it.

Well I got my first request, and I am going to do my best to get it answered. Chris in Georgia writes:

When I’m forced to use IE, I use a ‘skin’ called Greenbrowser. It includes a great feature that allows me to hotkey it to minimized, using “CTRL `” I’ve searched and searched for something like it for Firefox (including searching on Firefox Facts). I’ve also searched for the ability to set up custom hotkeys in FF, to no avail. Do you know if this exists? If not, where could I put this as an extension suggestion for those out there who do extensions?

Yes, this can be done with the Firefox extension MinimizeToTray. Install this into your browser and you will be able to send Firefox down to the system tray to keep it from taking up task bar space. How can you bring it back up? Well you could use your mouse and click on the icon or you could use the keyboard combo Ctrl+Shift+M.

Have another feature request or suggestion you’d like to see built into Firefox by default or added by an extension? Let me know about it and I’ll feature it on Firefox Facts and maybe even find you a solution to your problem (if you have one).

I just ran across a very cool entry over at Seth Bindernagel’s blog answering some “Q and A” about his work at Mozilla. Back in July 2006, Seth was brought into the Mozilla Corporation to help the key leaders and contributors of Mozilla think about how to run a community-giving program.

One Firefox extension to answer any question you might have. I do not know what would happen if you typed 42 into it, but with perfect answers aside, this is one must have extension. The Answers Firefox extension gives you quick and easy access to Answers.com.

Time for a history lesson on your favorite browser of choice, Firefox. I ran across this very detailed description of one man’s view of Firefox’s history. It just happens that this one man is Ben Goodger, the lead engineer for the browser in question. No matter if you are a new user wanting to know more, or an old user wanting to refresh your memory, you should give this a read.